Recently I was phoned by an old friend who owns a business in Sydney. He'd just learned I was in the web industry and he told me he had a problem with his website and needed some advice.

One policy I've always had is to avoid mixing friendship with business - something I'm sure many of you are aware of. Not that I'm adverse to giving the occasional freebie, but too often in the IT industry this involves learning some dark truths about your friend's on-line habits - information I'd rather not know.

When friends find you're in the business they often believe you can fix all the computer problems they've ever encountered. This is a myth, I know highly qualified network engineers who have difficulty configuring their email for new accounts, simply because it's a task they and many of us in the industry rarely have to do. When friends seek help it's also difficult to explain to them that the reason their system keeps on crashing is because they're too stingy to update their operating system (or the computer) from the original version of Windows they purchased in 1995, or that that their son Fred Junior, who is "doing computing at school" isn't the budding Bill Gates they believe he is.

Sure little Freddy talks the talk and has become a lightning fast one-handed typist, but as the browser's web history embarrassingly reveals, the reason he's reached puberty at age ten isn't due to him inheriting his dad's superior genetic code - it's because he's been spending all his time in the worst porn sites on the web which have prematurely kick-started his hormonal system into high gear.

It's even more embarrasing when you learn that the husband or wife, (often both) have been exploring similar areas on the web without each other's knowledge and suddenly you've become privy to their repressed fantasies.

It's not for me to criticise people's sexuality and it's understandable that after 20 years or more of marriage, couples yearn for a little spice or renewed adventure in the bedroom. But often such discoveries are enough to end a friendship - after all how does one explain that their friend's or their family's cyber-sex forays have resulted in the operating system catching the clap and that the hard disk needs dunking in antibiotics to clean out all the nasties accumulated through hours of clandestine porn browsing? Just keeping a straight face while tap dancing around the topic is damned difficult without smirking.

Computers are more dangerous than keeping a diary - and often more revealing. So where possible I avoid giving free computer advice - especially when it involves delving into their system's files where dark truths often lurk.

However I digress. My friend's problem was that they'd hired a web design company of great repute to build an expensive website and yet after a year on line, this creation wasn't pulling in any business. So what was wrong?

I agreed to check it out and after asking a few questions to learn some background, promised to get back to him.

On examination I couldn't fault the website. It was well designed, fast loading, nicely presented and overall very professional. My only criticism was that most of the texts were what I considered as sounding more like the nutrient description on a Corn Flakes packet than telling me anything interesting. There was too much breast-beating in the "About" section and talking down to the reader instead of factual information presented in simple language. But this unfortunately is the modern way of marketing.

It seems that it's now expected that the English language must be translated to web inspired "newspeak" where things are awesomely excellent and the global stakeholders will be proactive in their knowledge inputs while the products are robust and function seamlessly. Ironically this is one of the biggest complaints I hear from many decision makers who believe that website narratives have become so cliched that they're almost meaningless..

But perhaps I'm old fashioned, and in this case I considered it was only a minor irritation. It was a good website, yet according to my friend it wasn't earning its keep. He'd mentioned that it was taking "hundreds of hits" and agreed to get me more information on this. He also told me that it rated "high on the Google rating system, being on Page One of the search engine..."

Page Rankings can be deceptive...

I checked out the website's page ranking and the first thing I learned was that although it certainly did rate number two on the first page of the Google search engine, this was only for a search that included the company's name.

As an example, let's assume that my friend's company manufactured Square Metal Widgets. A Google search query asking for all companies that made square metal widgets in Sydney found them on page four of the Google Search results. Other searches varying the query wording gave similar results - with my friend's company way down the list.

But when I searched for his company by actual name and location, it popped up with several line entries starting at number two.

What many website owners don't realise is that when people are searching for a product or service on the internet, they don't always know the name of the company and will search by product or service and perhaps the area around where they live. Depending on how your descriptive texts are written, what your keywords are and how each page's meta data is arranged and described, determines how you'll appear in any given search result.

What has to be done is to anticipate what words the majority of people will use in a search query and write the website's meta data, keywords and descriptive text to include these in the hope that they is indexed by search engine robots, and hence when a query is made, your company shows high up on page one of said query result.

This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), and is a techique that some web companies like to make out is shrouded in voodoo. There are companies that specialise in SEO and are very good at ensuring a particular company features high on the page rankings, however there's also an element of deception involved. Some SEO companies will boast that they've achieved high page rankings and show you the search results for queries that include your company name. Many website owners are happy with this and sit back and wait for the orders to flow in, then wonder why they don't.

Other companies will offer to optimise the website further to make sure you rate high in the search engines for the products or services that you offer. Too often this is costly and not as effective as promised. It can also be a lengthy procedure taking several months to achieve high rankings - if at all.

Consider this: If there were a thousand manufacturers making Square Widgets and all of them paid for the best SEO companies to optimise their website and all companies did an excellent job, there would still be a number one listing on page one of the search result plus 999 others in descending order on the remaining search result pages.

So Page Ranking while important isn't quite as vital as it's made out to be. In the future it will become even less important - more on this in a later edition.

Self Help is Vital

However in the interim, if you are ranking low in the Search Engine Results there are some actions you can take to improve them.

When I mentioned these to my friend he told me that his website company had told him not to take any actions at all in the area of self help. Seems he'd been doing some reading on the internet and had picked up a few clues but when he mentioned this to them they'd become very dismissive - almost hostile. They'd handle it all they'd said, in fact it seems they went to great lengths to suggest he'd incur the wrath of the Web Gods if he did so.

In reality there was very little my friend could do to actually effect the company website - after all he nor anyone in his company had any clue of how to edit a webpage, let alone work on keywords or meta data. And of course they didn't have access to the web server or the upload codes. What it sounded like was his web design company being overly greedy and wanting to keep the entire web business shrouded in mystery for the obvious reason of gouging further revenue.

More checking also revealed that his marketing manager didn't have access to immediate web statistics. To get these they paid a monthly fee for them to be emailed. When I checked what he was getting, it revealed while he wasn't being told lies about the web stats, he wasn't being told the full truth either. They were paying almost five hundred dollars a year for statistics designed to keep them in happy ignorance - especially when it came to the number of hits being recorded (Go to the PDF download on the url below for the TRUTH about web hits and how they can be deceptive).

For statistics to be useful, a website should have a comprehensive stats module included - one that can be accessed at any time without paying extra. KISS includes a stats module as an optional extra for only $50 (once only) and more information can be viewed by going to the url below. You can view the same stats module in action on a live website by clicking on the Statistics Module option in the menu on the right hand side of the following page.

http://www.kissmultimedia.com.au/business_intro.html

The actions he was being discouraged to do, were it seemed, part of their trade secret that they didn't want leaking out because they were so damn simple to do! Anyone could do them for FREE but they wanted them to remain in the realm of magic for obvious reasons.

So what can you do?

I'll cut to the chase. Here's some tips that will get you up the page rankings and help get you more clients. You can do most of this yourself without needing to touch your website and you certainly don't need anyone's permission to do it.

1. Get other websites to link to you. Check your network of business associates and ask anyone with a website to create a link to yours. In return you provide a link to them. (you'll need your website company to do this for you - it's a very simple job...maybe 5 minutes work...) This may have obvious benifits all round, but it will also increase your Google Rankings, particularly if the websites linking to you already have good traffic. If they haven't do it anyway, provided the site isn't an obvious dog that is penalized by Google. For more information about how Google ranks websites go to Google's Webmaster Central You can create a webmaster's account - even if you're not your own webmaster - and use it to learn more about what actions you can take. Use the information to keep your website company honest!

2. Search the web for FREE BUSINESS DIRECTORIES. You'll find hundreds of these, but select the Australian ones first if your clients are predominately from Australia. It takes about five minutes to make an entry in one of these and you should make at least one entry per day (more if you have time). Some will request a fee, but reject these and move on to others that are honestly free until you've entered as many as you can. It will take a few days to get results but many of the popular business directories will already have high Google rankings and you'll be hitching a free ride that gets you up the rating scale. Later you can assess whether paid entries represent value for money.

3. Make a free entry in Googles Business directory. This includes a map of your location plus you can list you website address. Click here to view the Google Maps and Business entry area. In my opinion making a free entry in this directory will yeild bigger dividends than making a PAID entry in the online Yellow Pages. I've always found the Yellow Pages search engine achingly slow and clumsy - not to mention being over the top expensive. But that's only my opinion.

4. Use Newsletters to circulate useful information to your clients and prospects. There's a number of ways to do this, and there's plenty of information on the web about it. So a little time spent on research will be time wellspent.

5. If you haven't a website then get one! KISS offer a range of websites starting at only $150 - which includes domain name registration, design and 12 month hosting. So now cost is no excuse, if you haven't a website, it's time you did.

For more information on this and other website offers visit:

www.kissmultimedia.com.au

Remember the actions I've described are FREE and can make a big difference to how your website attracts potential clients. Consider learning how to manage your website and allocate just a small amount of time per day to making entries into the free business directories.

To conclude I must mention that my friend spent a few days making the above suggested entries and found within a week that his website was appearing higher up in the rankings, including the first page - mainly courtesy of the boost given the site by the FREE web directories. It wasn't perfect by any means butafter a month combined with other actions such as regular newsletters and information sheets, actual visitors to the site began to increase, but what is more important, a good proportion of these were being converted into customer inquiries and sales.

He's also had the satisfaction of being able to explain some home truths to the web gurus that were feeding him a line of garbage. I'm sure there were some red faces and their excuses would have been a revelation. Suddenly an old fart who's suppossed to be ignorant of the Brave New World of the Internet has got the drop on them. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.

So get to it and have a go. Even if you don't own a website you can still make entries in most Business Directories - remember they're FREE!

And if you've been travelling around the web's red light districts, make sure you regularly clear your browser history! This can be done by clicking on the Tools icon in your browser and selecting Delete Browsing History from the dropdown menu as shown.

Regards until next time

Don Dennis

Kiss Multimedia

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